title: Cloud infrastructures for in silico drug discovery: economic and practical aspects.
abstract: Cloud computing opens new perspectives for small-medium biotechnology laboratories that need to perform bioinformatics analysis in a flexible and effective way. This seems particularly true for hybrid clouds that couple the scalability offered by general-purpose public clouds with the greater control and ad hoc customizations supplied by the private ones. A hybrid cloud broker, acting as an intermediary between users and public providers, can support customers in the selection of the most suitable offers, optionally adding the provisioning of dedicated services with higher levels of quality. This paper analyses some economic and practical aspects of exploiting cloud computing in a real research scenario for the in silico drug discovery in terms of requirements, costs, and computational load based on the number of expected users. In particular, our work is aimed at supporting both the researchers and the cloud broker delivering an IaaS cloud infrastructure for biotechnology laboratories exposing different levels of nonfunctional requirements.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies, National Research Council of Italy, via de Marini 6, 16149 Genoa, Italy.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: D'Agostino
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Clematis
authors.forename: Alfonso
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Quarati
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cesini
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Chiappori
authors.forename: Luciano
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Milanesi
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Merelli
mesh_terms: D001709:Biotechnology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003205:Computing Methodologies; D055808:Drug Discovery; D006801:Humans